Customer Success OKR Examples

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help customer success teams prioritize initiatives through collaborative goal setting. Customer success OKRs bring focus and alignment to teams, centered around customer-first strategy and goals.

Learn more about what OKRs are and how to use them

While new customers indicate growth, retaining and supporting customers builds a thriving business. Customer success OKRs ensure strategically aligned goal setting, so the people using your product or service are equipped to reach their desired outcomes.

As the needs and desires of the customer frequently change, as do the demands of the customer success team. The biggest responsibility (and challenge) of the customer success team is adapting to these needs.

Customer success OKRs bring a proactive focus to the customer success team, helping drive outcomes ahead of ever-shifting demands. 

Customer success traditionally relies on lagging indicators to measure the health of the organization and the impact of its efforts:

• Retention
• Churn
• NPS
• Expansion
• Growth, etc. 

While lagging indicators are critical long-term KPIs, they don’t proactively solve customer success challenges.

Customer success OKRs improve this process by helping customer success teams prioritize initiatives based on leading indicators, tailored to specific stages of the customer journey. 

For example, if churn rate is a red flag indicator, OKRs for customer success build objectives around improving the growth and retention cycles. The supporting key results track progress with critical KPIs, helping customer success teams shift to a proactive strategy. 

Customer success OKRs can be developed by looking at the leading indicators in the different stages of customer success (note: these stages serve as an example and are not exclusive or exhaustive):

• Implementation
• Product/service adoption
• Growth
• Expansion/renewal

Choosing a focus is challenging — leadership can use insights from leading indicators to determine where performance is stagnating and which areas need improvement most. From there, team members can execute initiatives to drive the customer success OKR:  

• Education (implementation)
• Live support (adoption)
• Inbound requests (growth)
• Follow-ups (retention/renewal)

A well-executed customer success OKR strategy helps customer success teams anticipate the wants and needs of customers instead of reacting to constantly shifting demand. 

Customer success OKRs can apply to any stage of the customer success journey:

• Product/service adoption
• Customer implementation
• Customer growth
• Customer expansion and renewal
• Customer support
• Team performance

Check out all our customer success OKR examples below. 

OKRs for customer success: product/service adoption

Customer success OKR example 1

• ‍Objective: Increase product adoption
• Key result 1: 100% of assigned accounts have at least 3 live touches
• Key result 2: Write re-engagement messages for 12 customer lifecycle points
• Key result 3: Improve NPS score to 65+

OKRs for customer success: customer experience

Implementation

• Objective: Increase engagement with new customers
• Key result 1: Triple communication open rate in-product from 6% to 18%
• Key result 2: Triple follow-up meetings booked per week to 24
• Key result 3: Achieve service quality rating of 9.5 or higher
• Key result 4: Reduce response time by 300% 

Growth

• Objective: Enhance enterprise customer satisfaction
• Key result 1: Decrease negative complaints and feedback from 12 to 3
• Key result 2: Quadruple positive feedback items from 4 to 16
• Key result 3: Increase satisfaction rate from 4.2 to 4.8  

Expansion/renewal

• Objective: Improve end-of-cycle satisfaction strategy
• Key result 1: Collect 1,200 annual satisfaction survey responses
• Key result 2: Schedule 75 phone interviews with best customers
• Key result 3: Schedule 20 phone interviews with churned customers
• Key result 4: Present a Q4 improvement plan 

OKRs for customer success: customer support

Customer success OKR example 1

• Objective: Deliver a world-class customer support experience
• Key result 1: Achieve a CSAT of 90%+ for all tier-1 tickets
• Key result 2: Decrease first response from 1hr to <45mins
• Key result 3: Resolve 95% of tier-2 support tickets in under 24 hours
• Key result 4: 100% of support reps maintain a personal CSAT of 95% or more

Customer success OKR example 2

• Objective: Be proactive with customer success
• Key result 1: Implement a customer success platform to increase average health score to above 45
• Key result 2: 100% of red accounts have reviews scheduled
• Key result 3: Net retention rate >112%

OKRs for customer success: team performance

Customer success OKR example 1

• Objective: Ensure customer support is a high-performance team
• Key result 1: Maintain a weekly support group ESI/Pulse score of 8 or greater
• Key result 2: Promote 2 customer support reps to managers to customer success managers
• Key result 3: Recruit and hire 3 amazing new customer support reps

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